PaaS Buyer's Guide

Joe Masters Emison03/02/13

How to Select a PaaS Partner

Eventually, the vast majority of Web applications will run on a platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, vendor’s infrastructure. The shift will be gradual — significantly slower than the move to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers like Amazon Web Services — for ­several reasons. First, finding the perfect fit will take some effort. And, there will be significant loss of control over hardware and software, something many IT departments are resistant to. But it will happen, and now is a good time to evaluate the landscape of PaaS options and start planning your migration strategy.

For comparison’s sake, to put SaaS, PaaS and IaaS on somewhat level footing — that is, to describe them as alternatives to one other, and specifically, to talk about PaaS and IaaS as direct competitors — PaaS vendors really need to supply SaaS to simplify the deployment of Web applications. They also need to supply the infrastructure on which those Web applications run, as we’ll discuss.

To help sort out the options, we sent out a matrix with more than 70 decision points to a variety of PaaS providers. You can see all included vendors at our InformationWeek PaaS comparison site and download a full set of responses here. (R6690313)